The brave young activists of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, hounded in the courts, ruthlessly bullied but not yet broken in spirit, ushered in the new year last week in diminished ranks. Perhaps 5,000 demonstrators turned up at Civic Square, as the Beijing-beholden legislative council’s forecourt has come to be called. It was roughly half the turnout of the New Year’s Day protest a year ago.

There were scuffles with security guards. The Hong Kong administration condemned the protesters for admitting into their ranks a young man with a placard bearing the words “Two systems only when there are two countries,” a riff on Beijing’s broken “One Country, Two Systems” promise from the 1997 handover of the former British colony.

The New Year’s Day protest was only the faintest echo of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets in a series of sit-ins and roadblocks that lasted 11 weeks. More than a dozen protest leaders have since been jailed. Pro-democracy candidates for Hong Kong’s rigidly controlled legislative council have been disbarred, pro-independence activists have been criminalized, and the scene in Hong Kong last week was a sadly fitting end to 2018. According to Freedom House, the American research and advocacy organization that has been keeping an eye on global trends in democracy, political freedom, and human rights since 1941, last year was the 12th year in a row that democracy has been in retreat around the world.

Among the world’s police states, Beijing is downright triumphalist these days. What Chinese President Xi Jinping has shown the world is that with enough money and enough corporate-sector collaborators and compradors in the world’s democracies, you can imprison as many as a million Muslims in concentration camps and annex the South China Sea, and you’ll get away with it. You can jail human rights lawyers, kidnap Canadians, ruthlessly extort investment-hungry African nations, threaten Taiwan with war and commit any number of obscene outrages against human decency, and you’ll still have toadies with impeccable business-class credentials doing your public relations work for you in the opinion pages of the G7 capitals’ most respectable newspapers.

According to Freedom House … last year was the 12th year in a row that democracy has been in retreat around the world.

Canada stands out in this particular sort of squalor. Only a few months ago, the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal published a meticulously researched, 7,991-word analysis of 32,502 articles in Canadian newspapers going back to the year 2000. The study concluded: “With a few exceptions, the security implications of China’s economic rise have been largely ignored by the Canadian press.” No wonder, then, that Canadians were shocked last month at the ear-splitting abuse Beijing meted out to us in response to the detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, on a U.S. Justice Department extradition warrant. And no wonder as well that it was shock and surprise that followed when Beijing made hostages of diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and business consultant Michael Spavor.

In the Freedom House annual report for 2018, there’s some good news mixed in with the bad. The 16-year-old island republic of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony that sustained massacre after massacre during a 25-year war of independence against Indonesia, is at last a free country. Gambia and Uganda have been upgraded from not free to partly free. But Turkey — a NATO member — has been undergoing an ugly transformation from secular republic to neo-Ottoman caliphate under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Freedom House now ranks Turkey as not free. And it is to Turkey’s Erdogan that the increasingly isolated and deranged American president, Donald Trump, has now decided to outsource American policy in Syria.

So, apart from everything else, 2019 begins with chaos afflicting the command structure of the 60-country multinational anti-ISIL coalition in Syria and Iraq, which includes about 600 Canadian Armed Forces personnel. Most of the Canadian work has been devoted to training and support functions with Kurdish forces that Erdogan’s defence minister, Hulusi Akar, has now threatened to leave “buried in their ditches, when the time comes.” The White House has now decided that the pullout of American troops will be a phased affair over perhaps three months. Like that’s any kind of relief.

Meanwhile, the United Nations continues its descent into self-parody. Here’s just one example. The Saudi royal family, which got away with murdering the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October, oversees what is without question one of the most hideously misogynistic regimes in the history of modern nation states. The UN rewarded the Saudis in 2018 with a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women, a seat on the executive board of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, and membership in the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

Another highlight of 2018: the mass murderer Bashar Assad has prevailed in Syria. After turning his country into a fetid necropolis and setting off the world’s worst exodus of refugees since the Second World War — with the eager assistance of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Khomeinist proxy Hezbollah and Vladimir Putin’s air force — Assad is expected to be welcomed back into the Arab League within weeks. Sudan’s Omar Al-Bashir, who is himself on the lam from an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court 10 years ago on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, popped into Damascus for a visit with Assad last month, the first Arab League thug to visit Assad since Syria’s ouster from the League in 2011.

On the bright side, Sudan has been rocked by street protests in recent days, and the country’s ordinarily fractious opposition parties have united in a demand that Al-Bashir step down. He won’t jump until he’s pushed, of course, but hope springs eternal.

On the dark side — sorry about this — strongman-kleptocrat Nicolas Maduro is set to begin a second term in the Chavismo-ruined hellhole of Venezuela, following last year’s rigged elections. And in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, another thuggish and ruthless caudillo, but of the right-wing variety, was sworn in as president on New Year’s Day.

It can only be good news, though, that no matter how ineffectual and intellectually bankrupt the party’s leadership may be, the U.S. Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives from Trump’s Republicans. With any luck, they’ll be able to restrain at least some of their crazy president’s worst impulses.

And we Canadians, for all our parochial bitching and moaning, should count our blessings. Of the 193 UN member states ranked by Freedom House, Canada comes out in the top four countries, behind only Sweden, Finland and Norway, which racked up perfect scores. Canada scored 99 out of 100, losing a point over the wretched predicament facing so many of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples, which Justin Trudeau’s government, for all its failures and fits and starts, is at least committed to addressing.

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